+Not because I like my voice, but because
+
+[maybe it woudl be a good idea ten years ago]
+
+------
+
+[document (with archive links) what EY said]
+
+---
+
+[pronouns do have truth conditions]
+
+----
+
+So, if I _agree_ that pronouns aren't lies—if I can't point to I single sentence in the Twitter thread that I think is outright indisputably false, why was I so freaked out by this?
+
+Well. It is [written of the fourth virtue](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues/): "If you are selective about which arguments you inspect for flaws, or how hard you inspect for flaws, then every flaw you learn how to detect makes you that much stupider." It is likewise [written of reversed stupidity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence):
+
+> **To argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates.** [bolding mine—M.T.S.W.] Arguing against weaker advocates proves _nothing_, because even the strongest idea will attract weak advocates.
+
+Certainly, _there exist_ people out that are guilty of the ontological error that the Great Teacher is criticizing here, but the thread is written in a way that seems to suggest that there aren't any _better_ possible reasons why someone might object to Twitter's anti-misgendering policy. The Popular Author once wrote about how this kind of [motivated selective attention paid to weak arguments "are meant to re-center a category"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/)[^re-center]:
+
+[^re-center]: Almost as if the Popular Author believes that moving category boundaries around has epistemic consequences!
+
+> The guy whose central examples of religion are Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama is probably going to have a different perception of religion than the guy whose central examples are Torquemada and Fred Phelps. If you convert someone from the first kind of person to the second kind of person, you've gone most of the way to making them an atheist.
+
+> More important, if you convert a culture from thinking in the first type of way to thinking in the second type of way, then religious people will be unpopular and anyone trying to make a religious argument will have to spend the first five minutes of their speech explaining how they're not Fred Phelps, honest, and no, they don't picket any funerals. After all that time spent apologizing and defending themselves and distancing themselves from other religious people, they're not likely to be able to make a very rousing argument for religion.
+
+----
+
+[...]
+
+MASSIVE cognitive dissonance, "What? What???"
+
+This is my fault. It's [not like we weren't warned](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yEjaj7PWacno5EvWa/every-cause-wants-to-be-a-cult).
+
+----
+
+[univariate fallacy]
+
+Humans are _pretty good_ at noticing each other's sex. In one study, subjects were able to descriminate between photographs of female and male faces (hair covered, males clean-shaven) with 96% accuracy.[^face] This even though there's no _single_ facial feature that cleanly distinguishes females and males
+
+[^face]: Vicki Bruce, A. Mike Burton, _et al._, ["Sex discrimination: how do we tell the difference between male and female faces?"](/papers/bruce_et_al-sex_discrimination_how_do_we_tell.pdf), _Perception_, Vol 22, Issue 2 (1993)
+
+------
+
+[happy price, symmetry-breaking]
+
+As I've observed, being famous must _suck_.
+
+-----
+
+https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/
+
+The Popular Author
+
+"People started threatening to use my bad reputation to discredit the communities I was in and the causes I cared about most."
+
+[lightning post assumes invicibility]
+
+https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/
+
+> And the more perceptive and truth-seeking these people are, the more likely they’ll speak, say "Hey, I think we’ve got the lightning thing wrong" and not shut up about it, and society will have to destroy them.
+
+Have to?!
+
+The Popular Author obviously never wanted to be the center of a personality cult; it just happened to him anyway because he's better at writing than everyone else.